January Library Pick of the Month

January’s book of the month is chosen in honour of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27. Maus by Art Spiegelman is a truly significant book. This Pulitzer-award-winning graphic memoir encouraged a trend in compelling graphic memoirs about difficult topics. Students and teachers: let me know if you ever want to explore more titles in this genre as we do have several in the library. In fact, Maus is the first “comic book” to ever win such an esteemed prize. The book dives into the troubled relationship between the narrator and his father, focusing on the father’s experiences in Nazi Germany. Jewish characters are drawn as mice, and Nazi characters as cats. At the outset, it seems like a simple idea, but the depictions are astonishing and appropriately horrifying. Maus is a masterful work, full of nuance and depth. Characters deal with living in a polarizing regime of dehumanization and genocide, and consider the impact of intergenerational trauma, life as the descendant of a survivor.